A World Without Superpowers: de-centered globalism

welcome to you all on this lovely sunny day firstly I'll introduce myself my name is Nick Cox I'm in the department of international relations here at the London School of Economics and co-director of the center called ideas with my other co-director are Wes dad I was especially pleased to be asked by tonight's speaker to chair him dare I even call it an honor and a privilege to do so why firstly because Barrie has become a very good friend over the last few years since we've both been together here at the LSE since 2002 and 2003 a friendship I'd much appreciated and will continue to cherish secondly because like me he likes good wine and good food and together we have sampled much of that around London and indeed at his own house for which many great much gratitude both to him and to his partner and wife and thirdly and finally him most importantly I suppose because he is a very great scholar with a global reputation and I mean that I'm trying to think of a phrase to describe Barrie and I just call him one of the big beasts of IR and I mean that in the best sense of the word Feast barriers of Beast has a reputation which has been here for very long time based on a formidable output I'd almost say enviable sometimes extremely annoying people write articles Barry does books you finish an article in one year Barry does two books in one year he's both a wonderful inspiration to all his colleagues but one of those colleagues you really really don't like sometimes because he shows you up but it's been a formidable out but really quite formidable output on an extraordinary range of subjects but with a theoretical intent I think broadly speaking if I say broadly speaking within that large pluralist school called the English school which Bering has been much associated has probably done more to promote in the broader sense of that word I think over the last few years both Britain and in Europe Copenhagen in particular and of course in the United States of America whether in the United States of America they still understand or even understand what the English school actually means Barry still remains to be seen Barry has been many many universities of Warwick Westminster but I think he's returned really to his alma mater here at the LSE where he did his PhD and returned as I said just a while ago in 2002 2003 I could go through all his books all of his articles their big books their influential articles people states and fears which I was very pleased to republish two or three years ago when I was chair of the European consortium and political research it was great to bring out one of the great classics of I are barriers written on regionalism international security and now has turned his attention to to the 19th century and the importance of the 19th century in the formation of the international order but Barry just doesn't do theory Barry also does those things we sometimes call facts and he's been doing quite a lot of facts recently on the question of power transition where the world is and where the world is going to and that really is the subject of his lecture this evening and it's not equality growth and sustainability any possible combination thank you very much I nearly got you wrong there Barry I know what it is but I just want to make sure people previously you're speaking on gay liberation are now speaking on where are we you're not speaking on Twitter this is this is very LSE I have to say you know we ah there we are there we are you spot my best line there by the way but I'll forgive you oh not at all not at all not at all not at all anyway tonight Barry a speech on the world without superpowers a decent globalism I know there's lots of friends students colleagues and others in the audience so I wonder we bury a very very special round of applause Barry was out okay well I'd like to start by thanking fallacy ideas and the ir department for organizing this particular thanks to to Mick for turning up he's just back from Italy and probably would have liked to stay there rather than than coming back here but make us chaired my talks at the LSE on a number of occasions so it seemed like it was appropriate that he do this one as well and it's particularly good of him to do it because I have the feeling that he's not entirely sold on the argument that that I'm about to make so the fact that he's willing to sit there and grit his teeth is is much appreciated now what I want to do here is make something like a public policy argument which is not something that I normally much given to doing but I become a bit annoyed in some ways by the way in which the public debate and also the academic debate about as it were where the world is going has has ended up in a rather restricted form it's basically to America centric sorry Mick but it's it's to America centric in a number of different ways that there's a debate going on about essentially whether the United States is going to be able to hang on to being the sole superpower and within that a debate the kind of softer view the Eikenberry view if you will that America can hang on but it'll have to be a bit more accommodating a bit nicer to two other rising powers or the stevewall view that America basically has a big power gap going in its favor and can continue in a sense to to dictate to the world or to dominate the international system so there's an argument that the u.s. can stay on as the sole superpower and that this is a fairly stable situation the other argument is that is the kind of rise of China argument sometimes rise of India this is an argument that at some point we're going to have more than one superpower so that where China is rising and they'll be then some kind of rivalry between the United States and China and any other countries that seem to be moving up into the superpower ranks so that will go in a sense back to a structure although not necessarily a world politics a bit like cold war where there was more than one superpower in play now these scenarios basically are very American centric and they require the rest of the world to either balance against the United States or to bandwagon with it in some way and I don't think that really tells us as much as we need to know about how to think of the options as to how the present international system is unfolding because it seems to me there's a third option I hesitate to use the term Third Way which doesn't have a very good record in some respects in the things it's been applied to but it is a kind of Third Way and rather than talking about one superpower or more than one superpowers I want to talk about the possibility of a world with no superpowers right and there's a secular tendency in this in this direction we we arguably had three at the end of the Second World War and then we had two and then after the end of the Cold War we had one and this points in a particular direction of which the next Waystation is zero there now that's the argument I want to make now as Mick advertised me I have some theoretical pretensions here so you've got to do a little bit of theoretical work in order to follow this argument first of all you need to buy into a particular set of distinctions and the principle one is between superpowers and great powers superpowers are as the name implies big and system dominating other words superpowers have both the material capability and the social standing to operate globally and to influence in a major way things that happen all over the planet great powers are first of all not superpowers they are big powers that have influence in more than one region think for example of the moment it's of say China or the EU come to that if you think about as a as qualifying as a great power boom and then the next phase down is regional powers where you might want to think about countries like South Africa or Brazil or India whose power at the moment is mainly exercised within their region right these distinctions are may seem a little arcane but they are in fact quite important because a lot of the ir discourse does not make the distinction between superpowers and great powers and this distinction is in my view important because the argument I'm going to make is that it's superpowers particularly these powers that have the capability of the social standing to operate globally and to dominate the system in a global way it's this that's the endangered species we're not going to run out of great powers and regional powers anytime soon but the scenario I want to unfold is one in which great powers will be as it were at the top of the line and that therefore there will be no globally operating powers that as there have been for many decades so these these distinctions are important I don't want to get involved in a lot of definition mongering or anything like that but it's important to think that in qualifying to be a superpower or a great power you've got to have both material abilities and also the right kind of social standing this is for those of you who've studied international relations this is kind of Kenneth waltz versus Hedley bull and in my version of this story Hedley bull is going to do better than Kenneth walls although waltz is going to score some points along the way but basically it seems to me that much of the discourse as I described it in relation to the American centric way of thinking about the future is putting too much emphasis on the material side of what qualifies you to be a superpower or a great power and not enough emphasis on the social side and it seems to me the social side is what makes the big difference so I'm going to make quite a lot of play out of that it means therefore that there are options other than bandwagoning with the US or balancing against the US the basically the third option is ignoring the US the Americans may continue to try to lead but we don't have to listen to them and increasingly I think if you look at the news with this idea in mind there's more and more of that going on that the US may be saying things but fewer and fewer people are paying any attention now I'm going to make two kinds of arguments in favor of this Third Way no super powers world one is quite a historical argument which goes back as make mention too to the 19th century and is a generalized argument about the nature and distribution of power in the world and I'm going to cover that fairly briefly because there's another paper on that in more detail and the the main part of the argument is going to be about who the current candidates for superpower status and why I think they are the won't stay there or won't get there and that I'll end up towards the conclusion of this in speculating a little bit about the nature of zero superpower world the world with only great powers in it what would this look like would it be a good thing or not and very end I'll do that most unusual things for me I'll give you some policy prescriptions five of them to take away and think about in relation to this topic so let me start with the general argument and just sketch it out briefly we take superpowers for granted because they've always been around since the end of the Second World War we've talked about superpowers and you can if you want to push this idea further back as well some historians talk about Britain as a superpower in the 19th century when Britain had a particularly commanding global position in the world and it seems to me that the 19th century is important here because this was the time when a particularly big power gap developed between the modernizing West and most of the rest of the world based on the fact that the modernizing West was acquiring a new mode of power International Relations is obsessed with the distribution of power and doesn't think enough about the mode of power and what happened in the 19th century was it's basically a shift from an agrarian mode of power which have been around for a very long time to a thoroughly industrial mode of power and when this shift happened it gave a relatively small number of countries an extraordinarily big power advantage over those that hadn't made this transition this kind of advantage can be seen for example in the the opium wars in 1840 in which Britain was able to beat up China very easily without even breaking a sweat just by using a few gunboats and some local forces taken from its it's indian empire now to be able to do that to take on and defeat the largest most capable remaining classical agrarian power suggests an imbalance of power of a very large order and the point i want to make is that that imbalance of power took off in the 19th century when some countries began to industrialize and left the rest behind so it gave a small number of countries quite literally the ability to operate economically and militarily and politically on a global scale without anybody really being able to impose to oppose them in any very effective way and this is what has produced the world in which super powers have been able to operate and indeed able to exist that world which we take for granted because we've always lived in it international relations as an as a discipline as in a sense always lived in this kind of world so we don't think about it very much we assume superpowers are normal but in a longer historical perspective super powers aren't thoroughly abnormal this is not a natural condition of the international system in classical times the the distribution of power was more even but it was more even in a much looser system the system didn't become tightly integrated in terms of transportation and communication and the ability to fight global wars really until the 19th century so this phenomenon as it were got going as a consequence of the Industrial and other revolutions of the 19th century which opened up this huge power gap and they enabled a small number of countries to to dominate the system so the big argument I want to make in a sense the big background argument is that the particular conditions that that have allowed and enabled superpowers to exist and operate and to appear normal our temporary can they arise out of that transformation in the 19th century and if you begin to think of things in this way then where we are now is the beginning of the end of that period so we are coming to the end of the period when that transformation in the mode of power happened and the reason we're coming to the end of it is captured in the current phrase the rise of the rest which probably most of you heard in one context or another the rise of the rest basically means that lots of other parts of the world not all of it but lots of other parts of the world are catching up meaning they are coming to terms with and finding their feet within the revolutions of modernity that happened in the 19th century and which have been evolving ever since but and therefore the the great power gap that opened up between the west and the rest in the 19th century is closing so the the macro argument for a world without superpowers is that the particular conditions which enable them are disappearing that it will no longer be possible for any country to acquire either the material conditions or the relative amount of power necessarily necessary to to dominate and play a global superpower role because too many others will also have decent amounts of power and the system power is becoming more diffused in the system as this revolution of modernity catches up so rise of China rise of India rise of the rest is about saying that the peculiar circumstances of the peculiar gap in power that opened up during the 19th century are now coming to an end so if you put your mind forward a couple of centuries and look back at this time my argument would be that it's quite likely that that's how this time will be understood when the transition that happened in the 19th century in a sense began to become to completion and we move into an era where those kinds of capabilities are more widely spread in the system so that's the broad argument that this is a peculiar phenomenon not a normal phenomenon not a natural phenomenon and the conditions that gave rise to it are coming to an end okay let me now move on to look at particular cases if I'm going to argue that we're heading into a world without superpowers I have to deal it seems to me with the United States because I have to make an argument I'm not disputing that the United States is a superpower what I'm saying is it's probably not going to remain one for two months longer and I have to argue that those countries or entities that are discussed mainly as rising superpowers are not going to make it and here I'm going to focus mainly on China but I'll also say something about the EU since to my surprise at any rate there's still quite a lively literature on the EU as a potential superpower and I don't believe this for an instant so I'm not going to spend long on the EU and I'm not going to talk about Russia at all I'm a bit infamous for the view that Russia is down and out and not coming back and but we can deal with that in the Q&A if you think there are candidates I've missed out okay so let's let's start with the with the US I'm not really going to make much of an argument about the material capacity of the US the United States is still the strongest country in a variety of ways and it's holding reasonably well to the percentage of material power that it has it's got a big military lead over everybody else and that's not going to disappear very quickly so I don't particularly want to argue that the u.s. is going into some precipitate material decline I don't think there's any particular evidence for that it's going to be increasingly constrained I think by the rise of other powers but it's this is basically not not a material issue although the material issue is in the background as others others rise it's principally I think a social issue and one of the things that is I think a weakness in the general discussion of the United States as a superpower is that most of the emphasis is on its material superiority it's all it's big economy it's on its enormous military expenditure compared to the rest of the world etc etc and I don't think that the United States position as the sole superpower rests solely or possibly even mainly on its material superiority that's a necessary part of it of course but basically the United States position as the sole superpower also rests very substantially on a variety of social conditions the principal one of which is that some of the other big centres of powers in the system mainly Europe and Japan do not regard the United States as a threat and in some important ways subordinate their foreign policy in their general outlook to it they don't challenge the United States they don't balance against it in in any significant way so the United States has had a very powerful standing as a legitimate leader and it's had a very powerful standing also as the representative of a certain kind of ideology which we can loosely call liberalism and that ideology has universal pretensions and this is also underpinned America's position but one of the things I want to argue is that that social standing is weakening in a whole variety of ways it's also possible to argue that and here I'm picking up Hedley bull type themes again that standing as a superpower requires the support domestically the support of your citizenry and of your internal establishment and it is surprisingly easy to find quite large numbers of commentators including American commentators on the condition of the United States who point to the fact that maybe America's superpower standing is more likely to be undermined by Americans than by anybody else if the American citizenry loses the will or the interest or the willingness to pay for this global superpower role being in the global superpower hasn't been a lot of fun of late for the United States there have been lots of costly failures American politics is now extremely divided and in a sense paralyzed in a way that it didn't it didn't used to be so an argument can be made that domestic support in the US for continuing on with this global role may not be all that robust but I want to focus more on incensed America's global position because it seems to me that its its global standing as I say it's as much dependent on its social position as on its material capability and here we can look at three things we can look at American policies we can look at America as a model in the world and we can look also at the idea that any any one country should be allowed to to dominate the world or to play a hegemonic role start with policies then I am NOT going to make the argument that there was ever a golden age in which the United States was loved by everybody and all of its policies were thought well of makers a good old trot will certainly remember opposing American policy of various stages of his of his life but I think the one of the important things about the ending of the Cold War another another McPhee Muse I hope your I hope you're picking up on this this one's for you make but an important theme about the ending of the Cold War is that in a sense it stripped away part of what made American policy more acceptable so whether you liked American policies or not and a lot of people didn't like a lot of American policies think of the Vietnam War for example the general framing of the Cold War meant that America was on our side or we were on its side and that therefore one had at least to put up with these things for the sake of the greater good of American leadership that framing of things disappeared with the ending of the Cold War so American policies now stand out there by themselves with no particular other protections or justifications to to make them as acceptable in the way that they were during the Cold War now I don't want to dwell for a great length of time on American policies but there are a lot of American policies that don't have a lot of support most obviously of course think of American policy in the Middle East mainly seen by others as a bit disastrous the peculiarities of American policy towards Israel the not so successful population policy in Iraq all of this is not something that has engendered a great deal of support for American policy in in the world you could think now of course also that American economic policy has been in a parlous condition since the economic crisis starting in 2008 I think it's not going too far to say that the Washington Consensus which was the ideological underpinning of American policy if it hasn't quite collapsed it has at least taken a tremendous beating and no longer has the kind of cachet that it once did America has become quite protectionist quite serving in many respects it's no longer so obviously an economic leader in the way that it used to be and the idea is that it's peddling are looking a lot more flawed than they used to be and this I think has gravely weakened the social and political cachet of the American brand in in the world one could think about environmental policy on which the u.s. is generally seen as being more part of the problem than as part of the solution that's the American Way of life which no American politician can afford not to defend is seen by many others as being part of the problem when it comes the environmental agenda and the rather obstructionist role that American governments have played in that you could think of the war on drugs not one of the great successes of American policy not one that has a vast amount of support elsewhere I'm tempted also to think about American policy towards China and I could go on about this for quite a long time although since the Chinese over the last couple of years the Chinese government has been playing a more belligerent role in its in its neighborhood this argument isn't as strong as when I first made it but a case can be made that the United States is has a very particular interest in securitizing China and the rise of China because the United States is the only country threatened by the rise of China in the sense that if you follow a realist logic the rise of China has to threaten America's position as the sole superpower and the American government is on record as saying that it wants to maintain that position that's the sole superpower so no matter what the Chinese do if they succeed in rising they're going to threaten that American position this is nothing like the Cold War when the United States was able to gather together a large number of allies because they were seen to be common ground in relation to what was defined as a shared threat from the Soviet Union possibly Japan will share America's view but it's quite conceivable that the Europeans and others will not care very much about the rise of China particularly if the Chinese government manages to do a better job than it has done over the last couple of years of actually paying attention to its own rhetoric about peaceful rise and peaceful development so it's conceivable that the United States could in a sense get involved in a rivalry with China that isn't going to be of interest to anybody else because only the United States the stages of the United States is threatened by the rise of China so in a whole variety of policy ways the America is not doing very well in terms of inspiring followers lots of aspects of American policy are less attractive than they used to be and I think it extends from that fairly easily to say that the American role as a model as a model society as it were the the American American political rhetoric is is famous for in a sense claiming to own the future in the United States often thinks of itself and it's very much a feature of American political rhetoric that America is the right way of doing things think of Francis Fukuyama and the end of history type argument this is basically that the United States has has got the best answers to all of the problems of how to live the good life and then eventually the world will become like the United States a Star Trek world if you will where the whole universe has become Americanized now this it seems to me this was a good sell for for a long time America was a very attractive society it was rich it had a vibrant culture it was successful in all kinds of ways it's not looking so good now who would want American healthcare who would want American economic policy who would want American politics come to that this kind of nasty venal highly divided politics the things that America used easily to be able to stand for it can no longer stand for so easily I've mentioned already the the economic crisis of 2008 the gutting of the Washington Consensus so America is no longer representing a kind of right set of ideas about how to run the economy and on the more social political side of liberalism it seems to me the war on terror particularly the shenanigans of the Bush administration in conducting that war have really gutted America's ability to speak for the liberal agenda and the the the use of torture the human rights violations in the conducting of the war on terror whether you were a supporter of that war not have undermined the ability of the United States to speak for this liberal human rights type of agenda which it used to do and still does but now when Americans speak about this the Chinese and the Russians and others just laugh and say Guantanamo Abu Ghraib so the ability the traction as it were of the United States to represent those agendas has I think been being seriously weakened now the last point to make and it's a point I'm going to apply to the the other possible candidates in this game is that simply the idea that any one country should be the leader should have hegemonic role in the system this idea I think is going out of fashion it's never been very popular in many parts of the world but it seems that along with the phenomenon of the rise of the rest as others gain more power the idea that any one country should have some kind of hegemonic position here is decreasing ly popular so I take the rise of the rest as in a sense looking towards the demise of the legitimacy of a hegemonic role in the system the idea of a hegemonic role has always been difficult in a world in which sovereign equality is the notional key organizing principle and I think it's going to get more and more difficult and since I've not been very kind to Ken waltz so far let me let me score a point on his behalf writing in 1993 a long time ago waltz says this countries that wield overwhelming power will be tempted to misuse it and even when their use of power is not an abuse other states will see it as being so that's a pretty good summary I think of what's happened to the United States over the last couple of decades okay so my sense of the US is that its position it's it's still a superpower it's still the only superpower but its position is fragile and it to my mind it seems a plausible argument that the United States will increasingly lose the social foundations on which its global superpower legitimacy has been based let me turn then to China which is the obvious kind of most discussed candidate for a rising superpower are going to use the same kind of formula looking at the the material and the social characteristics now the material characteristics on China side are fairly impressive this is a country whose economy has been growing at a stupendous unprecedented rate for a surprising number of decades and still seems to be steaming along so there's a reasonable expectation that China is rising and rising fast and will probably be able to sustain this continuously expanding material position it ki has quite a long way to go in a whole variety of areas it's got quite a lot of catching up to do to to get to American or indeed Western standards as a whole but it's a very impressive performance so in a sense like America the material case isn't where the main action lies the main argument regarding China in some ways it's arguments that parallel those of the US but the main argument regarding China there is that it simply doesn't have the social resources necessary to construct a legitimate superpower role on the material side of things the Chinese have the same problem as the US with the rise of the rest China is rising but so is India and Brazil and a lot of other places so while China is getting stronger a lot of other places are getting stronger as well and therefore the ability of any kind of new aspirant to superpower status to actually achieve the level of material dominance necessary to act as the foundation for superpower status is becoming more and more difficult but let's think about the social issues in in relation to China I suggested when talking about the US that a goodly chunk of America's superpower status was based on the fact that it had friends Europe Japan and a variety of others part of what I see is the demise of weakening of American superpower position is that the Americans no longer appreciate that they have friends Americans used to talk about allies now they talk about coalition's of the Willing this is a very big difference in those rhetorics it seems to me but if you think about the Chinese and who are China's friends does China have any consequential friends at all any great power friends and regional power friends no not what China's friends are a miserable collection of small mostly rather nasty dictatorships in a variety of parts of the world I mean I'm not exaggerating you think about it who are China's parameters so China's starting social position here these poor China's policies are perhaps not such a problem as American policies because China has been still and still is conducting itself according to the famous dictums of Deng Xiaoping about keeping a low profile and not taking leadership positions and not trying to reveal one's power etc etc so China has been taking a you know we'll get along with everybody point of view often abstains in the in the Security Council it not really taken a leading or a political position on most of the major global issues it's been relatively self self interested in self concerned so it hasn't offended as many people as the US has done because it hasn't tried to do anything other than pursue its own particular self interest but the problem for China is that it's it's it not really a model for any other countries because its own circumstances are so unique that it isn't clear that China holds in the Chinese policy holds lessons for others and the Chinese themselves do not encourage others to think this so one of the much heard catch phrases in China is Chinese characteristics which is a way of basically saying that Chinese exceptionalism unlike American exceptionalism Chinese exceptionalism is basically inward looking it says China is different and unique whereas American exceptionalism says you should all be like us and can be if you if you want to be so there's a kind of inward looking self understanding which lacks the the Universalist appeal that America exploited so effectively for its many decades of world leadership the Chinese are also trying to sell a particular combination of things which i think is not going to go down very well with the other powers in the system what the Chinese are trying to sell is a combination rather odd combination of economic liberalism of getting on board with the WTO and the global market and all of that and but combined with keeping undemocratic communist government very conservative very liberal regime in anyways politically and this combination is one that rouses suspicions quite rightly in my view in the minds of others because basically the liberal deal in the world is that people accept economic interdependence and the opening up of a global economy on the condition that those who go into this game are also liberal politically and socially and therefore don't threaten each other but the country which is just buying as it were the economic liberal side of this package but not buying the the political and social side of the liberal package is potentially threatened it will get strong on the back of the global economy but it's still as it were running itself as as a dictatorship and Chinese rhetoric doesn't help here either in the sense that the Chinese rhetoric of peaceful rise which I'm a strong supporter but does have the problem with it that it's it doesn't say what it is that China wants to be like or what kind of international society wants to be hard of once it's risen so there's no ideas coming out of China about what kind of power we should expect it to be or what kind of agenda we should expect it to be pushing the basic message that comes out of Beijing is that and it's not an unreasonable one in some ways but they're basically saying look we're responsible for a fifth of the world's population we've got huge problems in dealing with that if we can develop this fifth of the world's population that's our contribution to the world because that will increase the world's wealth and it will increase the science of the arts and all of these things if we can do this and they've been doing a pretty impressive job having lifted several hundred million people out of poverty and agrarian life into something like a middle-class standard of living over the last 20 years so China isn't it isn't a model it isn't selling any ideas which look likely to be attractive to a wider global market they might be attractive to some countries some in its region a few elsewhere but China is not representing any kind of coherent ideology I mean its own its domestic ideology can only be labeled market communism if you think about that for a while that's a fairly serious oxymoron how stable can market communism be something has to give either the market has to give or communism has to give they can't coexist forever Marx would be turning in his grave so it seems to me although the Chinese performance is very impressive it's not on the way to being a superpower it's got quite a long way to go materially and it certainly it's a great power already and will certainly stay there but on the social side of things it has no idea it's nothing to sell and no friends so it's starting position is pretty poor and it doesn't look possible to create the superpower position from that base I said I deal briefly with the EU and I'll keep I'll keep my word on this I mean the EU is in some ways quite impressive as a potential superpower material bases there it's got a modern economy and all of that okay it's militarily rather modest but that could be changed fairly quickly if there was a will to do so in terms of the EU as a model it's quite widely admired more so by people who are not members of it than people who are but nonetheless in in the world out there the EU it doesn't threaten very many people it's got no enemies it's a nice kind of feel-good social democratic model and it's a very advanced integration project which is thus a admired and in in many places it doesn't trigger very many worries anywhere maybe a little bit in Russia but hardly anywhere else nobody's scared of the EU it doesn't have doesn't trigger threat responses in in others so in some senses the EU might be a possible superpower it's got good social standing it's got good material capability the problem is nobody in the EU wants to make the EU into a global superpower the citizens don't want it the elites don't want it there's simply no political will to do this so it seems unimaginable that the EU is ever going to play more than the kind of big regional great power role that it plays now ok so if you buy those arguments then it seems to me we're heading for a world without super powers I'm not quite sure how long this will take but I'm pretty confident there won't be any new super powers and I'm reasonably confident that the u.s. is not going to last all that long in that role it will continue of course to be the biggest single power in system for quite a long time but that's not the same as being a superpower so if I am right big if but if I'm right what we're heading towards is a world in which there will be mainly great powers and regional powers but nobody playing a super power role and let's face it I mean given the experience of the Americans who would want the job of superpower it's not it's a very expensive demanding job for which you get not much appreciation but the picture we're looking at here is one in which a more regionalized world perhaps seems to be the logical outcome we think of a world in which there are several great powers scattered around on different continents these great powers have some differences of ideology but they are all basically this is an important point in the ongoing argument about why this scenario is not necessarily a bad thing the important point here is that all of these potential great powers are now basically operating some version of capitalism we're no longer in the world in which there's a great ideological debate about how to organize political economy there's quite a love air iation within that but compared to say the 1930s sort of or the Cold War when there were zero-sum games between extremely opposing ideologies about how to organize things we're in a relatively benign world there are differences of culture of differences of practice and history that suggests regional variation as a not unreasonable way of looking at the future I don't particularly want to get into the argument of exactly what these regions are going to look like are there going to be lots of them or are there just going to be three or four big ones I don't know we can talk about that in the QA if you want it not so much the particular detail of Adi centered world but the fact of a tea scented world the world operating now with a more even distribution of power or the movement towards such a world now why should we not worry about such a world the certainly long tradition of such worries they have been generally hinged around analogies with the 1930s which was the last time we had this kind of D centered world so you will often find that bogey of the 1930s is wheeled out in defense of American hegemony or whatever and I think this is an analogy that's more or less completely false in the sense that the 1930s is so radically different from where we are now that no lessons can be learned from it that are relevant to to where we're going it's true that the West is declining and others are rising but nobody's looking for the job of world superpower these other rising powers are not necessarily looking to take over the world or competitive with or opposing the existing order even the Chinese stress the extent to which they are a status quo power anxious as it were to get on board with the main lines of the existing global order so other other cultures are not aggressively looking to rise and take over the world as was the case during the 1930s they're more in a defensive position saying we'd like to get the West a bit more off our backs and do our own thing a bit more but we don't want to take over the world this is not a the common view out there I think the the logic of anti-u German is amiss very widespread in the rest of the world and that operates not only of course against the West but it would also operate against any other country that was trying to take over the position of the West or to move itself into a hegemonic position unlike in the 1930s there are no big ideological or racial divides over which large numbers of people are prepared to go out and kill each other which they were in the 1930s as I say we're in a sense we're far from being ideologically homogeneous but there's much less cultural and political economic difference in the way things are organized than there was during the 1930s and this I think matters there's also the fact that everybody is afraid of war there's no appetite for a world war out there and everybody wants some version of the global economy to keep going because everybody's going to be impoverished if it doesn't so there's a much greater collective interest partly stemming from the lessons learned in the 1930s in keeping it keeping a degree of global order so I think this 1930s analogy is simply wrong and wherever you hear that as an argument against a more decentered world you should I think rejected on the upside something which is not much talked about because I think the social side of things is ignored so another point for for Hedley bull is that this despite the cultural and to some extent political differences that still remain in the world which I don't want to underplay there is a remarkable amount that's commonly shared and accepted quite widely across the board and not just by elites but by peoples I mean the general idea that we should organize ourselves into territorial states which claim sovereignty of the right of self-government is very widely accepted and very widely aspired to by those who don't have it the notion that we get along by using diplomacy and international law as the framing within which these these political entities deal with each other is also very widely accepted there are disputes around the edges of it but the basic principles are not not contested the idea that the big powers in the system have some managerial responsibilities classical English school idea but it's also fairly widely accepted although not up to the point of allowing them hegemony nationalism at the principle of national self-determination is it seems to me extremely widely accepted in some ways it's the basic legitimizing principle of the whole of the international system popular sovereignty is not much contested even dictators acknowledge that basically popular sovereignty is what's going on there may be a few monarchies left in the Arabian Peninsula or one or two elsewhere who haven't this message yet but basically most of the rest of the world is organized around the idea of popular sovereignty there is a shared idea of progress no matter what ideology you have practically everybody is on board with the idea that we should pursue progress that we should pursue a an advance of knowledge and advance of material capability technology and suchlike everybody is on board with the idea of human equality an idea that is relatively recent in the sense that you only have to go back to the middle of the 20th century and earlier to get into a period when the basic assumption of international relations was human inequality so Empire and slavery and racism and all kinds of other things were justified by the acceptance of the principle that humans were not equal we've moved on from there and this I think also helps to underpin a common set of global values and increasingly everybody is in some way wedded to the market as I as I suggested the different versions different takes on this of course but much narrower set of differences them have existed historically so this it seems to me provides even in a more dissented world this provides the normative basis for order which is quite impressive in some ways and should not be just ignored or dismissed we have been building an international society and we've been quite successful at it in some ways it seems to me also that in this kind of decentered world there will be room for quite a lot of cooperation there's interest in pursuing a lot of things jointly not just the global economy but there will probably be interest in environmental management interest in carrying on as it were collective big science in relation to space to physics and other sorts of things so it seems to me that we we are in a world if I can use some terms from Alex when we are in a world that looks more like one of friends and rivals rather than rivals and enemies it's not so much of enemies left in the system as there used to be and therefore the cultivation of this kind of social order is something that we really need to be doing there are some potential downsides in this any of you who have strong liberal dispositions out there your hearts will have been sinking as I've been talking here although nobody's actually walked out yet but it does seem to me that the Universalist liberal project is not one of the winners in the scenario that I'm painting here but the Universalist liberal project has not done too well over the last few decades and therefore perhaps giving it a rest for a while and allowing other ideas in play it's not so bad a thing more worrying would be if we're living in a more decentered world where regions are in a sense more self-organizing some of these regions are not going to be very pretty Africa probably is still not going to be any prettier than it is now and perhaps also the Middle East although the Middle East is in such a state of ferment at the moment is hard to know quite what the outcome there will be and one hopes that the Arab Spring will produce a good outcome but some regions will be disordering other regions will do quite well the EU is already an example of a region that's extremely well-organized and in that sense provides a kind of one possible model of how to go with this the Americas look reasonably well organized it's conceivable that East Asia could pull itself together it has growing regional institutions although that's still quite a big difference of opinion as to what will comprise an East Asian region so the picture that emerges out of this will be mixed some regions will be more stable more orderly some will be less there may be some places it's countries like Russia and say China or India missplay their hands and try to become regional hegemon then they will encounter local local resistance it's not going to be a perfect world therefore but not going to be too bad a world either it seems to me now let me draw this to a close by then moving towards the five policy prescriptions that I offered you just the sum up I'm going to read this because I can't think of a better way of saying it than I've actually written out here that this World Order with superpowers might therefore be seen both as the successor to the unbalanced Western era of the 19th and 20th centuries in which one civilization imposed itself massively on all of the others and as the restoration of the classical order in which the distribution of civilization and the distribution of power were fairly evenly matched and fairly evenly distributed the unique feature of this Third Way is that for the first time it combines both a relatively even global system and society a global distribution of power and a densely integrated and interdependent global system this I'm labeling D centered globalism this is my contribution to IR jargon for the for the moment and I contrast this D centered globalism with the more centered kinds of globalism captured in the many corpora free characterizations of the modern world order so this label hope expresses the emergence of a truly post-colonial world order a return to the more even distribution of power pre-modern times but in a globally integrated context created by modernity now if this model is plausible and I say say I offer it as an alternative to those arguing for a continuation of the the Western status quo or for some kind of return to competing superpower arguments what kinds of prescriptions arise from this well five I'll offer you first there's no particular need for the United States to see our challengers to its sole superpower status because there are not that second that status is anyway indefensible both socially and increasingly materially too after the collapse of communism and the fall of the Washington Consensus everyone should feel ideologically both more open and more humble and accept that what is needed is a period of competitive experimentation with the political economy of capitalism let the u.s. continue its love affair with economic liberalism Europe it's with social liberalism China and Russia there's with authoritarian capitalism and whatever other versions of this particular mixture come up everyone needs to relax a bit take a live and let live attitude and see how these different modes succeed or fail in producing the good life since no known alternative path the durable power exists the general commitment to some form of capitalism is now quite deeply rooted 3 all great powers need to look more to their regions and how to create stable consensual and legitimate international societies there and perhaps somewhat less to their relationships with each other traditional security concerns are no longer the key factor in relations amongst the great powers China needs to think more about its relations with Japan and Southeast Asia and less about those with the US and the US needs to think more about its Hemisphere and less about Asia and the Middle East that is the dhih centering part of decentered globalism for that said all great powers also need to be aware of the substrate of ideas and institutions on which they agree and to build on this to create not just a coexistence international society in which different modes of capitalism can live together peacefully but also a cooperative one capable of handling joint problems such as world trade and big science and collective action problems such as the environment and nuclear proliferation developing an interaction culture of friends and is important fine the West as a whole and the US in particular need to accept the fact that they no longer own the future they can take some satisfaction from having imposed much of their political economic and social form onto the rest of the world and so substantially shape the direction in which the future will unfold but now they have both to acknowledge that not all of this was either good or well done and to let the rest of the world experiment on how best to accommodate its various cultural and historical characteristics to the Western legacy and it seems to me this is not a bad alternative to either ongoing us Germany or a struggle between rising and declining superpowers arguably perhaps it's also more likely than either of those scenarios thank we have somewhat like 20 minutes for questions and very will of course provide the answers you've heard the Suzanne manifesto yeah chap in the middle there if you could where's the how many microphones we have just the one or okay fine so take your chap in the middle is waving is added us with me here this come in here here okay I'll take a couple together just somebody else is somebody down here yet it's lady here be very brief with your questions please so I want Barry to be okay press ran things very much for a very interesting talk I'll keep my question brief I just want to sort of question your use of a particular historical analogy there now I agree with you what's happening today we're not in the 1930s but I'd like to point out that the country that did end up taking over the world United the United States didn't spend thirties trying to take over the world and it really struck me that during your talk that while I agree with you I broadly agree with your characterization of China and it struck me that you could have applied every one of those characteristics and descriptions to pre World War two America and yet America grew up to be the superpower that dominated the world and I'm just not entirely sure that given your list of Chinese characteristics you can be perhaps so blase that China will not attempt to it assumes for some form of superpower role within the international system alright soft on China Lee here very quickly not a long manifesto is technology evenly distributed in world so that too to be able to avoid the right of the rise of another superpower in case there is big problems like depletion of resources climactic change or another on first off okay this gentleman just behind you're taking prickly good brief questions yes I will consider your approach on this decentralization of cooperation in the world as a system now my question is a little thing on this kind of a system should be should have some kind of strategy or cooperative approach where is dominated by Emilia which the future superpower will be who has more knowledge more information that will they say coordinated with the other they say but on the only civilization okay China is three bar just to start with okay all right on the parallel with the US and China I mean I think an interesting case can be made for drawing a parallel between the two in some respects particularly in the idea of peaceful rise in some ways China's present strategy is most easy to compare with the strategy of the United States in other words economic engagement but a kind of political isolation is a horrible political and unwillingness to engage with the world for quite a long time now I think your analogy is going to break down here in the sense that the United States had the advantage of having its way to global power paved by two world wars that left everybody else completely wasted and in this sense the Americans were the successors to this and very wisely or you might want to argue very cynically we're late entrance to all of those wars right so they waited till everybody finished beating themselves up and then came in and took the spoils as it worked so the United States had a very nice entry into world power but this is not going to happen with China I mean the main drift of my argument is that power is now diffusing everywhere on the back of modernity taking different forms in different places but basically more and more people are finding ways of coming to terms with modernity and drawing the power from it that this this presents so China is not going to be presented with the kind of power vacuum that that the United States was presented with at the end of the Second World War in terms of technology being even evenly distributed well yes and no certain kinds of technology are not evenly distributed obviously there's a kind of leading edge to this and there and there always will be so in one sense I'm not expecting everything to even out and there to be a kind of uniform again a Star Trek world in which everybody is up exactly the same standard on the other hand enough technology and specifically technologies is where certain kind are evenly distributed to change the the dynamics of the system in relation to dominance so for example to give a simple example everybody in the world no matter how poor and grotty can get access to any number of ak-47s and RPGs this is a universally available technology even the Afghans can build ak-47s it's a nice simple thing if you can arm your people with that kind of technology it makes your country almost impossible to occupy so as the Americans and others have discovered people do not have to be equipped with very serious sorts of modern technology it only has to be modern enough to make a big difference in in the way the world operates does globalization need a strategy well I guess you could make a theoretical argument that it would be better if it had one but then you'd be facing the problem we don't have a world government and we're not likely to get one very soon so probably we're not going to have a kind of centralized management system we're going to have a negotiating system of some sort which is what we've got now the only difference that I'm positing is that it will be a lordy centered negotiating system with a more even distribution of power in it rather than some countries pretending that they're actually the leaders of this system and have some special right to dominate it all right there's a question here and then a question at the back but I'll move on quickly yeah please just quickly what do you think are the prospects of this system to be a stable one to preserve its stability and do you anticipate or what if some of these raising or falling powers make the so-called securitizing move in order to preserve their own position against the others okay very good thank you Barry in 2008 you argued that global warming is the wild card if I armed up here that globalization that global warming is the white card of IR and kind of for the s2 to remain a superpower did you give up on the US on that or thank you okay very much further sir okay um will the system be stable I think overall yes although in some parts no I mean my basic argument is that they're going to be no takers for the role of global leadership because nobody will have the capability and nobody will have the will and there will be more resistance to anybody trying to do that then in in this sense and given that there is a sub-query a wide substrate of things that we actually do agree about it across all of the diversity 'z that we have and given that there are big constraints on resorts to violence and and also a certain amount of agreement on things that we need to do jointly I think the system probably will be fairly ordered at least at least as orderly as the system that we've got now right I mean one might want to argue that the present system has broken down because there was incense it was too ambitious that the capacity for global governments that running a neoliberal global economy required simply wasn't there and that we need to take a more modest view of what what we can achieve and to focus it better on particular pressing problems I mean that goes to the ambitious question about about the wild card of climate change or global warning I've left that out of this talk as you as you rightly spot partly because it's a set of unknowns this is an argument I made elsewhere for those of you who don't you don't know that basically the environment is a kind of wild card and thinking about international relations so it's like a joker that is going to come out of the deck at some point and change the game but you don't know at what point it's going to come out and you don't know quite what the Joker is going to represent when it does come out is it going to be a sea level rise is it going to be global warming is it going to be some kind of disease the the chance of something of this sort happening in a systemic way that makes a big impact is I think reasonably high over the timespan in which I'm thinking here about this about this new global order and of course the whole thing could quite literally be swept away if you factor in a six meter sea level rise over the next two decades into this scenario then we're living in a different world and much of the argument that I'm making would then probably disappear because this argument kind of assumes a a status quo in relation to the environment quite what would happen if there was a very big serious environmental emergency depends on what kind of emergency it is and would therefore take many hours to discuss it's not just one scenario it's any number of possible scenarios and quite how they're going to play out you know you can't really think about it in the same way that you can think about this narrow or set of political economic and social problems I recognize one Christian wears Star Trek fits into this is this is this an expression of Americans of Germany but that America will never have another Star Trek we can China have a Star Trek and I know your interest in science fiction of knowledge expresses and symbolize yes sir well make you've got you obviously not read my piece on Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica I have the Daihatsu yeah but yeah I mean I think it's actually it's an interesting an interesting image because Star Trek to me represented the the peak of American self-confidence and America as seeing itself as a universal model for the rest of the world the inevitability that America would be the world's future that was just kind of taken almost taken for granted and Star Trek was as good a representation of any any as to what such a world would would in fact look like America is really no longer producing Star Trek's I mean the the odd Star Trek film that comes out is very dark battlestar galactica which is anti-technology and thoroughly depressed about the state of the universe and the species seems more representative of America's mindset at the moment so if you want to do a pop kind of pop culture interpretation of the decline of America's will to superpowers whatever have to sit down there and watch Battlestar Galactica AJ so I had actually read the article I just on here the game is great okay I got somebody over here somebody over here yeah yeah thank you for your talk first of all in the last couple points that you talked about you you said that there needs to be a focus on this powers need to have a focus on the region America needs to stop meddling in the Middle East and so on and another point you said is that we need to see how these permutations of capitalism play out because no one knows right now but given all the rhetoric and the focus on the globalized marketplace and globalization as a driver of economic growth for all these powers I pick up on a conflict there in that if they're supposed to focus on the region how can they simultaneously focus in a global marketplace hmm okay uh my video talks like this little there's always a smug I are undergraduate graduate who's just for the waltz and absolutely fascinated by by him and I'd like to make the let's go okay yeah I'm playing the devil no I am idle or though I've played the playing the devil's advocate here and I'd like to make the new realistic challenge I appreciate your ideas on the social fabric of the International Society but because it's very until intuitively appealing but I just like to hear you reiterate that defense for postpositivism and and kind of explain why it matters that if United States might lose its social standing thank you I'm not quite sure of this question why it matters if the u.s. loses its social standing yes because the mysterious challenge would be that it doesn't matter because it's just material power and that that dictates whether a state is a superpower or not because it's not popularity extracted Kenneth but towards what's wrong with water right okay the question about the contradiction between the regional regional focus on one hand and the need for a global economy on the other um I don't I don't see this is really a great difficulty I mean think of the EU EU has quite a strong regional focus in one's in one sense and is engaged in the global economy and another and the same is true for most of the countries in in East Asia I think this is a circle that can be squared I'm all in favor of competition to figure out which system works best and in that sense that makes a certain amount of difficulty for a global set of rules but since there is I think a fairly strong interest in keeping a global economy going in some in some quite meaningful sense it seems to me that solutions to this will be found much along the lines that they have been found already there's an awful lot of accommodation to regional variation in this system already now the question about material power is all is all that counts I mean to be frank I find it a little bit hard to take that seriously because it it rather supposes that the political world is entirely about coercion and I simply don't believe that the political world on any level is entirely about coercion and if it is it's stupendously inefficient I mean this was in a sense the hypothesis driving some of the neocons in the Bush administration you can find lots of quite good quotes you know that by God we're now powerful as hell and it's our time and we're going to do whatever we like out here because it doesn't matter what anybody else thinks well hello that was put to a fairly firm test and it actually turned out to matter what other people think so he want to run a world weather globally or domestically scale I think doesn't matter on this if you're trying to run such a world entirely on the basis of coercion and material power it is stupendously inefficient then you will have actually lose out to those who've got a better idea and get people to like them okay I got somebody in the middle there yep here please yeah Mike my question is would the weight of numbers even out with reference to a measuring instrument that is money and the main consideration so that I'm referring to currency yeah could you say that again so it's very difficult so I can't hear you um yeah if we're thinking about what money is what are the weight of numbers even out with reference to a measuring instrument that is money that some entries into our accounts it's it's like the main consideration in the system mining known as numbers what would the currency are you numbers of what numbers early just money in money money yeah so I'm referring to currency yeah brilliant bring in some cards you good I am doing some research into what many years though I'm introducing no idea so it's always very good money in that case can I ask the definition for money okay right right well okay and then we had another somebody else and ánewá yeah yeah please thank you for your presentation professor Poisson and my question is regarding the conditions enabling the emergence of this invasion endangered species of superpowers that you talked about I had the impression that he said the conditions enabling this emergence one were actually brought about by the major transformations of the Industrial Revolution so is the take-home message from this that this is a one-off to see such superpower or that these conditions are to be found only in the initial stages of of any new epoch in a way that is characterized by new mode modes of production yeah okay Robert take two there I think now have to be the last terms to be worrying about the time I know must apologize to everybody have their hand up one more person at the back actually just just one last one please professor Bauman thank you very much for your lecture just a quick question which is whilst we have the power decentralizing on a global and presumably also local level for example through we can see that with the Localism bill in the UK what do you think could you share your your opinion on what effect this will have on the relationship between culture and international society thank you very much okay that's three to three to end with Barrett okay start with the money yeah I'm not sure I have anything to say about all that about the money I'm not an economist and that sounded to me if I understood it correctly to be a rather technical question about the state of the of the world economy and I'm not going to bore you by pretending I have a coherent answer to that so I'm going to pass do it okay here at all sir I do it all the time yeah but it's not my style and I'll then take advantage to take twice as long to answer Prime's question on which I could talk for hours about the condition of the emergence of superpowers I mean to put it in as small a nutshell as I can manage this would be about what you might want to think of as a change in the dominant mode of production something which happens rather infrequently in the human condition but when it does changes everything okay in the sense that if you look at what happened after the shift from Hunter gathering to agrarian mode of production there were fantastic changes rise of cities expansions of population all kinds of new ideas and ways of and ways of doing things these things don't happen very often the 19th century was another one the change from an agrarian mode of production which have been dominant from millennia to an industrial one and this completely changed the mode of power it changed the the political construction of change the social construction changed the economic construction it changed the nature of the technology prevailing therefore changed everything about power in in a very big dramatic way these things don't happen very often so I'm not anticipating another one just around the corner we seem still to be unfolding I mean in in this world historical sense we are not very far away from this transformation we are still living inside the early stages of it if you want to look back on it from a far point in the in the future it's like as if we were just at the beginning of the rise of cities or just at the beginning of the the shift agricultural production so this one probably has a long way to go and therefore we have lived through a remarkably dramatic event but since we've grown up inside it but we both as individuals and also international relations as a field has grown up inside that event it looks normal and what I'm trying to persuade people is to step outside of it take a longer view of it and see that it's not normal it's extremely abnormal and represents a very unusual therefore set of conditions at the back about the effect of this distribution of power on culture and international society I think this is a it's a mixed picture in the sense that I'm assuming that the rise of the rest is going to act to diversify culture more in sex what is moving away if I can mention the Star Trek model again one is moving away from the idea of some kind of universal liberal All American style social and political and economic model for the world and also away from the world in which everybody speaks English and dresses and behaves like Americans would do so I'm assuming that the rise of power in a variety of other areas will also empower reom power a variety of other cultures and in that sense things become culturally more diverse but I'd also put quite a lot of emphasis on the argument that I made in a rather sketchy way in the talk that there is one of the legacies of the period of Western hegemony is that there is quite a remarkable and quite powerful substrate of shared ideas including really big ideas like nationalism which we all shed I mean the thing about nationalism is two centuries ago nobody had ever heard of it and it wasn't really in play in international society and then the French invented it and showed everybody what a great idea it was or at least showed everybody how much power generated and now we all we all live with it and it feels totally natural so if you go to the heartlands of China or to Brazil or anywhere in the world you'll find that nationalism is as naturalized as football nobody thinks of footballs being an English game and nobody thinks of nationalism is being a French idea they are totally naturalized and I think this provides an important common social substrate which we can build up okay I think we will call it an end terrific they would say that when you have exams going on at the LSE you get very low numbers well I think we've just proven that tonight and a test to the pulling power of prose and I promised Barry I would not use the phrase swan song when describing tonight's lecture but I have and it has been it's personal note at least I should end it's been great fun working with Barry especially in the joint and joint course we teach in there for the first year interestingly entitled the structure of international society which I think was first given that name by a man called Charles Manning many some in this audience may know about but it was a very dominant figure in the IR department for over 30 years so Barry has been fantastic for me working and lecturing alongside you you they say you're retiring but I don't believe it but you tell me it's not really a retirement but will where you can see anyway I was certainly miss working with you I know your colleagues in the LSE Department of International Relations will miss having you around however I do look forward to having lots of good meals with you and Deborah over the coming weeks and years and you can pay because even if you couldn't answer the question on money we can talk about that one later but anyway it's been fantastic great Turner a great lecture and I think we should try profound appreciation

Channel: LSE

Views: 35,065

Rating: 4.9254661 out of 5

Keywords: LSE, London, School, of, Economics, London_School_of_Economics, University, College, Public, Lecture, Event, Seminar, Talk, Speech, socialscience, Professor, Barry, Buzan, Barry_Buzan, world, without, superpowers, de-centered, decentred, globalism, west, western, superpower, developed, global, power, diminish, diminishing, international, relations, cooperation, regional, coexistence, IDEAS, humanities, politics, government, history, geography

Id: 8jVXh6b0ofM

Length: 92min 15sec (5535 seconds)

Published: Thu May 12 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/SolusOpes]

I usually watch these, but I definitely wanna check this one out, because I'm curious if it's going to be 11 seconds long of a guy just saying, "Nope, can't happen."

Because..... what?!?